Alissa McArthur

Scaachi Koul has risen to prominence over the last few years as perhaps the most recognizable young voice in Canadian media. Currently a culture writer at Buzzfeed, Koul has gained a huge following on Twitter for her unique blend of self-deprecating humour and scathing commentary on racism and misogyny. Koul spoke to Room about female mentorship, racism in Canada, and the challenges of self-care. Look for a longer feature interview with Koul in Room’s upcoming issue 41.1, Family Secrets.

Ricepaper Magazine has been publishing literature and art by Asian Canadians since 1994. Though they transitioned to digital only in 2016, Ricepaper is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for a print anthology, Currents. We spoke to Ricepaper’s fiction editor Karla Comanda and poetry editor Yilin Wang (also a Room collective member!) about the campaign, and changes to their magazine over the years.

Rachel Thompson is the founder of Lit Mag Love, an online course that supports writers in their efforts to submit to literary magazines, the former managing editor of Room, and a current member of the editorial board. She will edit our March 2018 issue, "Family Secrets," which is open to submissions until July 31, 2017. Assistant editor Arielle Spence asked Rachel a few questions about the nature of secret-sharing, her own family secrets, and what she looks for in a submission.

Alberta writer Lauralyn Chow opens her debut short story collection Paper Teeth with a description of a Chinese restaurant. There’s an English menu, a Chinese menu, and an “unwritten menu of non-replicable Chinese dishes, food that no other table is served,” setting the table for Chow’s humourous exploration of family tensions. The interconnected stories in Paper Teeth follow the Lee family of Edmonton. Unlike their parents, the Lee kids—Lizzie, Pen, Tom, and Jane—never learned Chinese, opening a communication gap that widens throughout their lives.

The ten stories, each named after a Chinese restaurant menu item, provide brief, funny glimpses into daily life with the Lees. Although the stories span from the 1920s to present day, Chow eschews the familiar tack of the multi-generational immigrant epic. Instead, she offers amusing and poignant snippets in her rambling comical prose. Chow’s stories resist a linear narrative of the “immigrant experience” by dropping us into the middle of familial conflicts with no discernible beginning or end. Time bends and loops throughout the stories as Chow telescopes events from the future and past in her frequent asides. The result is a cluster of stories that use gentle humour to negotiate family ties, religion, race, and cultural difference.

While food doesn’t feature prominently in every story, it often functions to highlight and bridge the characters’ cultural divides. In one story, a grown-up Jane dreads hosting her overbearing Auntie Li-Ting and her smelly medicinal bandages. Jane resigns herself to her aunt’s presence with the appealing prospect of a Chinese cooking lesson, but Li-Ting subverts Jane’s expectations with an entirely different meal. In another story, Jane begins to reconcile her fraught relationship to religion and language by recalling the commensal experience of a feast at the Chinese United Church.

Linked short stories present a unique challenge. While the format frees Chow from the narrative cohesion required by novels, the irregular structure works against her collection as well. While we get fairly rounded portraits of Jane, Lizzie, and their parents, the scant exploration of the other characters feel less like strategic omissions and more like lost opportunities. Yet by homing in on the domestic eccentricities of the Lee family, Chow manages to tell a rich story, however uneven, through small moments. With unique humour and style, Paper Teeth introduces us to a fresh voice in Canadian short fiction.

Alissa McArthur is a member of the Room editorial board. She holds an MA in English literature from UBC and lives and writes in Toronto.

Terri Brandmueller is Room’s former poetry submissions co-ordinator, and a great lover of food. A skilled baker, Terri has written about food for Women's Day, Fresh Ideas Magazine, and Eating Well. Her family is equally passionate about all things culinary—her father is a baker and chef, and her kids work in the restaurant industry. To celebrate the launch of Room 40.1 Food, Terri spoke to Room's Alissa McArthur about her life in food and writing.

From the 1960s to the late ’80s, the Canadian government forcibly removed over twenty thousand Indigenous children from their families, sending them to be fostered or adopted by white middle-class families. As with the residential school tragedy, the children taken in the “Sixties Scoop” grew up severed from their Indigenous families and culture. In Carol Daniels’s debut novel, Bearskin Diary, Sandy Pelly, a survivor of the Scoop, embarks on a career as a news reporter in 1980s Saskatchewan. As she connects to local Indigenous people through her reporting, Sandy begins to yearn for a deeper connection to her Cree heritage.

Daniels, a former journalist and Canada’s first Indigenous national news anchor (as Carol Morin), portrays the broadcasting world as a noxious environment for a young Cree woman. But Sandy’s fierce desire to tell stories draws her closer to the Indigenous communities she was cut off from as a child. Daniels convincingly conveys Sandy’s struggle to cover stories about Indigenous people with compassion while battling racism from coworkers and her own internalized prejudices. Thrust into the role of cultural mediator in a largely white newsroom, Sandy finds herself being treated as a “cigar-store Indian, here for show but expected to stay silent.” When Sandy meets an elder named Joe, who encourages her both to investigate the disappearance of local Indigenous women and to explore her own cultural identity, she finally begins to meaningfully engage with her community.

However, most of the novel’s characters aside from Sandy are flat, especially the antagonists, who are portrayed as irredeemable villains. And though Daniels juggles many intriguing storylines, she grants a lot of space to a melodramatic love story that ultimately fizzles. As a result, some of the novel’s most engrossing aspects—such as Sandy’s reunion with her family and her investigation into the missing women—are given somewhat short shrift.

As well, the novel is hampered by Daniels’s decision to write extensively in the present tense. While it lends a sense of immediacy, the use of the present tense clutters the narrative with ponderous details of the characters’ daily lives. Furthermore, the frequent shifts from the present to Sandy’s memories in the past tense are clunky and become tedious to read.

Still, Daniels has created a compelling character in Sandy, and does not shy away from depicting her weaknesses. Though the writing doesn’t always support the many narrative threads Daniels explores, Bearskin Diary is a humane, unflinching portrayal of a woman asserting her voice and claiming space in an often hostile nation.

More often than not, when Roomies gather, we talk about books. Books we can't put down, books we couldn't put up with, and books that make us talk. For this reading list, eleven of us got together and discussed novels, short story collections, poetry, memoirs, and comics that we have read and loved which happen to be written by Canadian Women of Colour. A few of these are well-known classics, a few are upcoming releases. There are stories set locally and abroad, and also include one in dystopian Toronto. Writing from the Women of Colour perspective is not a genre, but instead a multitude of voices, stories, and experiences coming together. And even though we are honoured to feature a handful of these writers are in our upcoming anthology, we know that this is just a starting point, and by no means a comprehensive list of books written by Canadian WOCs. At Room, we recognize that there is work to do, and we are already working on a part two.

Getting a peek of an avid reader’s bookshelf is one of life’s simple pleasures. If you’ve ever shown up to a house party and gone straight to the host’s bookshelf, you know how satisfying it is to snoop through other readers’ libraries. The editors of Room love reading (obviously), and we’re giving you a glimpse of our shelves and sharing how we get the most out of our sacred reading time.

Getting a peek of an avid reader’s bookshelf is one of life’s simple pleasures. If you’ve ever shown up at a house party and gone straight to the host’s bookshelf, you know how satisfying it is to snoop through other readers’ libraries. The editors of Room love reading (obviously), and we’re giving you a glimpse of our shelves and sharing how we get the most out of our sacred reading time.

Getting a peek of an avid reader’s bookshelf is one of life’s simple pleasures. If you’ve ever shown up to a house party and gone straight to the host’s bookshelf, you know how satisfying it is to snoop through other readers’ libraries. The editors of Room love reading (obviously), and we’re giving you a glimpse of our shelves and sharing how we get the most out of our sacred reading time.